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A Sinkhole Offers Plenty of Nothing to Talk About

The hole on Thursday. It caused traffic to be rerouted.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Jose Fonseca considers himself something of a pothole connoisseur.

Since he started working at his brother’s tire repair shop on Webster Avenue in the Bronx a year ago, he has learned which kinds threaten tires, which bend hubcaps and which trip pedestrians.

But on Friday morning, just steps from the tire shop, he puzzled over a hole in the road that had opened before his eyes, a hole so vast that he could find no place for it in his pothole taxonomy.

“I don’t know,” he said, eyeing the crew in hard hats hovering around the hole, before offering this: “That’s the grandpa of the potholes.”

This grandpa was in fact a 10-foot-deep sinkhole measuring 20 feet by 20 feet that opened up Thursday morning on Webster Avenue at 198th Street in the Bedford Park neighborhood. The hole was easily big enough to swallow a car, and a maintenance man who works in the area said a taxi drove over the spot just moments before the hole cracked open.

As a result of the sinkhole, the police rerouted traffic while city workers continued to repair the damage. Con Ed took the precaution of cutting off the gas to two customers, and the city shut off the water to about 160 customers on Thursday afternoon.

On Friday, after most news cameras had moved on and gas and water service had been restored, the huge hole turned into something else. It remained an inconvenience, certainly, but it also became a strange new neighbor to ponder, offering an unexpected hiccup to the rhythm of the day.

People stopped to gape and talk about how the sinkhole came to be and about its effect. Mr. Fonseca recounted again and again how he saw the road give way. Across the street Raymond Pagan, a building superintendent, claimed that he was the one who called 911 first.

A block away, a group of men gathered outside Part of the Solution, a social service agency, in anticipation of the daily free lunch. As they waited for the doors to open, they watched backhoes fling dirt at the hole while jackhammers tore up the road around it. They spoke of earthquakes and sewer pipes and the lunch menu.

Photo

Workers on Friday were still repairing damage from a sinkhole that formed a day earlier in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Richie Clark said he had seen plenty of holes in city streets before, though he acknowledged this was a big one. “That’s not a pothole,” he said. “That’s like a meteor crater-type hole.”

While he did not think that seismic activity had played a role in forming it, he wondered if that would make for even bigger sinkholes.

“I always heard we might get an earthquake in New York,” he said.

James J. Roberts, a deputy commissioner with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, called the Webster Avenue sinkhole “sizable,” but said it was not the biggest he had seen.

The sinkhole, he said, was probably caused by a break in the sewer line, which dated to 1939. Water most likely loosened the soil between the pipe and the road, leading to Thursday’s collapse. If necessary, work will continue through the weekend to repair the damage.

“It’s got everybody’s attention,” Mr. Roberts said as he stood near the hole on Friday morning.

Many of the businesses around it were either closed Friday or, thanks to light foot traffic and the police tape blocking off the street, might as well have been. On any normal Friday, there would be a bustle along this commercial stretch whose storefronts form a snapshot of the Bronx’s diversity.

There is the African halal restaurant next to the Albanian bar opposite the convenience store run by Abdullah Ahmad, a native of Yemen. There are three barber shops (one with a sign offering tax services) and two tire repair shops, including the one where Mr. Fonseca became an expert on potholes. Next to Mr. Fonseca’s brother’s shop stands La Sirenita, a nightclub with a city notice on the grate, just below the busty mermaid on the sign, declaring the club shut down. Mr. Fonseca said there were so many fights there, part of his duties had included washing blood off the sidewalk every Monday.

For Mr. Pagan, the superintendent of a string of buildings on the block, the sinkhole has made for new burdens.

He was up until 4:45 a.m. on Friday locking and unlocking doors for repair crews checking water and gas lines. He carried buckets of water to a restaurant kitchen trying to prepare lunch despite its waterless faucets. And he led landlords and tenants through a maze of yellow tape and construction equipment.

He was ready, he said, for life to return to normal. “It was an experience,” he said. “Believe me.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2010, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: A Sinkhole Offers Plenty of Nothing to Talk About. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe